Today, customers attempt to manually manage and align their availability management with their information technology (IT) infrastructure. Changes in either business needs or the underlying infrastructure are often not captured in a timely manner and require considerable rework, leading to an inflexible environment.
Often high availability solutions and disaster recovery technologies are handled via a number of disparate point products that target specific scopes of failure, platforms or applications. Integrating these solutions into an end-to-end solution is a complex task left to the customer, with results being either proprietary and very specific, or unsuccessful.
Customers do not have the tools and infrastructure in place to customize their availability management infrastructure to respond to failures in a way that allows for a more graceful degradation of their environments. As a result, more drastic and costly actions may be taken (such as a site switch) when other options (such as disabling a set of applications or users) could have been offered, depending on business needs.
Coordination across availability management and other systems management disciplines is either nonexistent or accomplished via non-reusable, proprietary, custom technology.
There is little predictability as to whether the desired recovery objective will be achieved, prior to time of failure. There are only manual, labor intensive techniques to connect recovery actions with the business impact of failures and degradations.
Any change in the underlying application, technologies, business recovery objectives, resources or their interrelationships require a manual assessment of impact to the hand-crafted recovery scheme.